Principal Investigator
Yi-Rong Peng, Ph.D
Assistant Professor, Department of Ophthalmology
Dr Peng is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on large-scale transcriptomic profiling of retinal cells in healthy and pathological conditions to understand human vision and provide insights for the study of ocular diseases. She joined the Jules Stein Eye Institute as an assistant professor in January 2020. Dr. Peng received her PhD in neurobiology from the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
Her doctoral research examined the role of functional interactions between inhibitory and excitatory synapses that maintain the stability of neural networks. She then joined the laboratory of Dr. Joshua Sanes at Harvard University. In her postdoctoral work, she utilized high throughput single-cell transcriptomic methods to reveal molecular profiles of the retina and uncover key transcriptional factors that control the specification of retinal cell types.
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Lin Zhang, Ph.D.
Lin is a bioinformatician who is interested to apply bioinformatic tools to uncover the molecular underpinning of the formation of retinal circuits and provide the pathogenic understanding of retinal diseases. Her research involves analysis of genomic and transcriptomic datasets, data mining, computational modeling of large-scale datasets, and molecular and cellular biology. She joined the Peng Laboratory in October 2020. Lin received her PhD from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Michelmore lab, Genome Center, University of California, Davis.
Undergraduate Researchers
Lab Assistant
Lab Alumni
Tongzhou Xu, Ph.D.
Tongzhou was a part of the Peng Lab Family as a Visiting Postodoctoral Scholar from Fall 2020 to Winter 2021. He actively worked on Proteomics and CRISPR construct/ Plasmid manipulation.
Peng Laboratory at UCLA 